boftx has asked for the
wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm not sure where this should be posted, but since I am seeking the wisdom of the Perl community at large, I'll start here.

A number of people where I work (in Austin, Texas) are interested in taking part in the Austin Perl Mongers group. However, we have received no response from that body. What can we do? (One would think it should be active given the recent convention held here, but that doesn't appear to be the case when one visits the website for the group.)

Kind of frustrating, this Austin Perl Monger group. We have had trouble finding a good place to have meetings. Now I've heard that HostGator is going to sponser us and provide a place to meet. Our last meeting the 7 of us stood around at a bar and had a very nice but mostly social meeting. Good bar, but not a great place for a meeting. In attendence were Matt Trout and John Napiorkowsky! That was Dec 17th.

Notices about meetings tend to go out the day of the meeting, I'm sorry to say. We should have great meetings. Our current president once convinced Ingy dot Net and Reini Urban to come to a meeting in Austin to discuss some of the new directions for making Perl faster. There were only 6 of us there for that.

Things look good for the new year. If we get a sponser, have a good place to meet, put together interesting presentations, I'm sure there are a lot of people using Perl in the Austin area. There are a lot of great things happening in the wider Perl community. Our group just needs to do a better job of advertising and conducting meetings. For solidarity sake, anyone interested could also join the perl meetup.com group in Austin; please.

According to our president, Will Braswell, we are aiming to have meetings twice a month: one at the sponser's meeting place and one at a bar. The meeting I described was a 'holiday' meeting. So social was good, and the bar, 'BB Rovers' is a great place. But the issue of a place to have regular meeetings is a long standing problem for the Austin Perl Mongers. I'm hoping for a convenient location with plenty of seating, WIFI, and a projector. We had a fantastic presentation in November covering Catalyst, big data mining and graphing tools. No projector. We were all gathered around a table in a coffee shop.

The Austin PM had a good meeting tonight. We had about 12 attendees. HostGator supplied a fantastic meeting room with projector, screen, pizza and drinks. I was hoping to see boftx and maybe some of his coworkers at the meeting. But, the point is we are back! We have a working list of upcoming presentations and are hoping to get more attendees.